An Interview With Dr. Valli Batchelor and Dustin Wright

An interview with Dr. Valli Batchelor, a World Student Christian Federation/ World Council of Churches delegate to the 57th Commission on the Status of Women and Dustin Wright, a staffer with the Lutheran Office for World Community. Dustin and Valli discuss their experience at the CSW, the role of dance in Valli’s work and the upcoming WCC publication on clergy sexual abuse of women, “When Pastors Prey.”

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The work of a gynaecologist who treats rape victims who have been subjected to sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the focus of a film which has just been released. "The Man Who Mends Women", tells the story of Dr Denis Mukwege.

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Report lays out "baseline" for progress in gender equality

Although women are outpacing men in achieving higher levels of education, they are still more likely to pursue the humanities as opposed to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. That's according to the World's Women 2015, a UN report which looks at how women worldwide are faring in eight critical areas such as health, education, work, p […]

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Who has the authority to stetle this argument? I submit that it needs to be stetled and that freedom of conscience is a conclusion inconsistent with the discussion so far. The only authority to stetle questions that are not clear in scripture for the entire catholic church is an ecumenical council. The bishop of rome has absolutely no authority in the catholic church outside that granted by the synod of his local church synod (sometimes called Roman Catholicism).Fortunately, this is not an issue that is core to christian doctrine; it’s just a pastoral issue which is most approriately addressed one way or the other on a local level. It does not need, and in fact is especially inapropriately addressed, on the catholic level.Fortunately also, scriptures are pretty clearly not condemning of long-term monogamous homosexuality. There has been absolutely no convincing evidence that committed same-sex relationships are in any way short of the image of God’s Love, or even objectively disordered and harmful. There is ample evidence that preaching such a position endangers and kills people, leaves them in miserable, unfulfilling lives, drives them from God and leaves them in darkness and misery, as well as enciting weak-minded, weak-willed individuals to violently attack and kill GLBT’s.It’s a question quite simply of whether we have enough faith in God’s mercy and goodness to risk erring on the side of mercy and compassion, or whether we are so fearful of a vengeful and uncomprehendingly violent God that we would risk others for a made up law (which seems to originate from a short-term political position) which costs anyone outside the immediate pastoral context nothing to enforce.I grant you that making up laws from political opinions and then transforming those laws into doctrines is something of which the romans seem to have made a specialty, but none of that has anything to do with genuine catholicism. Certainly it would NEVER give him the authority to stetle a pastoral concern in a diocese outside rome, let alone one in another denomination of catholicism. Certainly an authoritarian political structure such as that which is the ambition of a bishop in Rome has nothing to do with Anglicanism and, even less so to do with the TEC.